Potty Training Has A Surprisingly Political History

Before most children can tell which way is up, Alicia
Silverstone’s son was potty trained. As the actress-cum-vegan
diet pusher explains in her new, and already muchderided, parenting book The Kind Mama, young Bear Blu was
learning the fine art of sphincter control well before he could
speak or walk.

It worked like this: When Bear Blu clenched his body and pouted
his face just so, Silverstone—at all times, super in-tune with
her baby’s bodily proclivities—knew that he was ready to go, and
would promptly find a toilet over which to hold him. Silverstone
employed a potty training technique called “elimination
communication”—which, she explained in a recent interview, is based
on the idea that babies “give you cues but we’re ignoring those
cues.” Even the youngest infants can purportedly communicate when
they are ready to go; attentive parents need only respond to
these “cues” in time. “Elimination Communication” (EC) was made
popular in the early 00’s by writer Ingrid Bauer’s
book Diaper Free: The Gentle Wisdom of Natural
Infant Hygiene. The book was inspired by a trip
Bauer took to India, and her observation of how “mothers in these
cultures” approach toilet training.

A rather antithetical strategy was used in East Germany just a
quarter-century ago; there, officials used militant, communal
potty training schemes as a means of breeding steadfast Soviet
citizens. Under the Communist German Democratic Republic,
toddlers attended state-run crèches that were equipped with large
“potty benches,” on which, several times a day, every child sat
down—and remained seated until everyone was done. “This not only
aimed at training [children] to use the toilet,” explains
Berlin’s DDR Museum, “it was a first step to social
education.” Forcing children to deficate on cue ostensibly taught
submission to authority. Synchronized bowel movements preceded a
synchronized politics.

The very opposite was happening in parts of West Germany, most
notably, in the experimental Kommunes of West
Berlin. There, New Left activists—eager to test the bounds
between private and public spheres—came
together for a heady experiment in cooperative living.
In the Kommunes, sex was uninhibited and
revolutionary, lovers’ quarrels were resolved communally, nuclear
families were outmoded, and “coercive
toilet-training” was broadly decried.

When the Wall came down, Soviet daycares were closed. But was it
too late? Had authoritarian toilet training tactics already
wreaked psychological havoc? In 1999, 10 years after
reunification, communist potty training made headlines anew—when
German criminologist Christian Pfeiffer arguedthat the practice had rendered East
German adults unsuited to democracy. Communal toilet training,
Pfeiffer argued, broke a child’s naturally rebellious spirit and
“raped” his soul. As a result, an adult exposed to the technique
became authoritarian inesprit, and more likely to commit
racially motivated crimes.

The personal is political, they say. Little is more personal than
bowel relief—and little is more political than how you choose to
raise your kid. It should be no great surprise, then, that at
various points in modern history, potty training has been imbibed
with great ideological significance. Even today, the potty proves
an enduring battleground on which grand forces—nature and
nurture, state and individual—face off. Toilet training continues
to be a source of profound anxiety—if not quite in the way that
Freud theorized.

In some instances, potty training assumes a symbolic form. Such
is the case right now in Hong Kong, where a potty
training-related fracas has escalatedinto a nasty altercation between the
city-state and Mainland China.

Last month, a young Chinese child urinated on a public street in Hong Kong.
In much of China, some parents let babies relieve themselves on
city streets; but in Hong Kong, they don’t. This particular
incident was filmed by a Hong Kong resident who controversially
released the footage online.

It went viral, and the incident inspired weeks of demonstrations
and counter-demonstrations in both countries. But it wasn’t the
solitary issue of public urination that fed such passions;
rather, as The New York Timesexplained, the incident became a proxy for a
larger cultural battle—over whether “Hong Kong, a former British
colony [is] now being colonized by mainland China, whose visitors
increasingly flood the territory with their money and alien
manners.”

At other times, potty training is seen not just as indicative of
broader social philosophy, but as an essentially formative
episode in its own rite. This line of thinking took off during
World War II.

American anthropologists turned to potty training in the early
1940s, while studying what they believed to be the particular
aggressiveness of Japanese soldiers. Could this aggression, asked
noted scholars like Margaret Mead, be caused by premature toilet
training? Anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer thought so. He argued (as
it turns out,falsely) that Japanese parents potty train
their babies earlier than Western parents do—and that this
accounted for “the overwhelming brutality and sadism of the
Japanese at war.”

Gorer’s reasoningwas that premature toilet training
forced Japanese babies to control their sphincters before
important muscular development had taken place. This caused
intense rage, which the infants soon repressed. This repression,
in turn, gave rise to severe and compulsive personalities.

Some of this psychoanalysis was done in the service of the
American war effort. In the early 40’s, Geoffrey Gorer and some
of his like-minded colleagues werehired as analysts by the U.S. Office of
War Information’s Foreign Morale Analysis Division. There, they
attempted to build basic personality profiles of foreign
nation-states. (In a related project, Gorer linked infant
swaddling in Russia to manic-depressive personality disorders.)
Gorer’s research on Japan would expand, but he
always insisted: “Early and severe toilet training is
the most important single influence in the formation of the adult
Japanese character.”

Freud placed great stock in potty training, a critical event in
what he called the “anal phase” of childhood. If a babe is
toilet trained too early or too harshly, Freud warned, then he will be frozen in the anal
stage and will become a straight-laced and up-tight (what we now
call “anal retentive”) man. Some of the anthropologists who
served the U.S. government were deeply inspired by Freud and
eager to apply his theory.

Philosophers swallowed the same pill. Soon after the Holocaust,
Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno hypothesized that excessively disciplined
children developed character traits like robotic obedience, easy
submission to authority, and susceptibility to anti-Semitism.
Some parenting guides later extrapolatedfrom this, directly linking punitive
toilet training with Adorno’s “authoritarian personality.”

The unstated corollary, of course, is that less-disciplined
parenting fosters independent, tolerant, democracy-minded people.
All of a sudden, in the 1950s, writes cultural historian Nicholas
Sammond, “the need to understand and regulate child-rearing was
not simply a matter of faddishness or marketing; it concerned the
course of history.” In the United States, the notion that
childrearing should be studied and regulated gained ground.

As the century wore on, researchers challenged the idea that
events like toilet training have much impact on whether one
becomes serene or uptight, broad-minded or hateful. Partly as a
result of this theoretical shift, potty training became a more
permissive affair. Enter the still popular“readiness approach,” which holds
that infants should be “ready” for the potty before parents
introduce it. In 1946, celebrity pediatrician Dr. Benjamin
Spock urged parents to “leave bowel training
almost entirely up to your baby…. [who] will probably take
himself to the toilet before he is two years old.”

The rise of the mass-produced and inexpensive disposable diaper
in the 1970s hurried along this liberal shift. Before long, the
diaper company Pampers was urging parents to relax a bit—and to
delay potty training into toddlerhood. In 2007, Pampers
introduced a diaper for children who weigh more than
41 pounds: the typical weight of an American five-year-old.

Today, lax potty training—or no potty training at all—is the
trend du jour. But depending on your view of
things, what Alicia Silverstone and fellow“elimination
communication” enthusiasts are advocating is either a
throw back or a next step in this trajectory. Advocates laud EC
as the “natural” choice. “Throughout most of human existence,
parents have cared for their babies hygienically without relying
on diapers,” writes Ingrid Bauer in Diaper
Free! “In many cultures around the world, mothers still
know how to understand and respond to their infant’s elimination
needs to keep them clean and content.” In fact, EC borrows much from anthropologist Margaret
Mead’s research in the 30’s, which extolled the virtues of the
“primitive” mother.

In After Theory, literary theorist Terry
Eagleton observes that appeals to morality and
psychology “have often enough been a way of avoiding political
argument. Protesters don’t have a point, they just have
over-indulgent parents. Women who object to cruise missiles are
simply consumed by penis-envy. Anarchists are the effect of poor
potty training.” Indeed, the subtext of the ceaseless potty
training debate remains decidedly political.

As blogger Maria Guido writes on Mommyish, “The
idea is that your child was born ready to potty train and it’s
your lazy Western reliance on environment-destroying disposable
diapers that is getting in the way of your six-month-old’s
natural inclination to use the actual toilet.” That sounds like
bad politics, not just bad parenting.